Diary of a Mad Scientist

Biodiesel Beginners and Advanced classes: Biodiesel Boot Camp

I’m teaching biodiesel homebrewing during two weekends in Febuary. You
can take either one or both weekends’ classes.

Locations: both of these are in Berkeley, CA-

Beginner class: Feb 17-18
Dwight Way near Sacramento Ave, hours:10-4
possible repeat of this class to take place in Oakland on Feb 23-24 -
email me if interested, I can only offer it if I get a minimum of 5
people in the class.

Advanced class: Feb 24-25
Ashby Ave near San Pablo, hours: 9-5

Each class is $120, register at www.girlmark.com/tour

if interested in the Thur-Fri session of the beginner class, please
email me at classregistration@girlmark.com

**********************
Feb 17-18: two-day class for beginners, no previous experience
necessary. This is similar to the classes I normally teach every few weeks.
10-4 both days, Berkeley (Dwight Way near Sacramento Ave)
may be repeated in Oakland on Feb 22-23

The beginners’ class includes hands-on biodiesel chemistry, and an
opportunity to build an Appleseed biodiesel processor if you want to buy
a B100supply.com kit of parts for one. The class will include an
introduction to equipment design, quality testing, quality control, the
scientific process, common pitfalls, recovery from emulsions, the
factors that influence ‘conversion’, drawbacks and advantages of
biodiesel, and discussions of biodiesel versus solvent thinning or SVO
technologies. You will make some common ‘engineered failures’ and learn
what they mean. Basic safety practices are stressed.

You may use this basic class as a prerequisite for attending the
advanced class the following weekend.

***********************

Feb 24-25: Advanced Class:
Two-day advanced class covering in great detail many new things that I
(and others) don’t normally teach.

I will NOT be offering this class very frequently as there is limited
interest in advanced topics.

I am also offering this class in Saginaw, MI in June and in
Chambersburg, PA in May or June (dates to be announced at my website)

************************
Advanced class details:

For the advanced class, I’d like you to have some experience (see end of
post for prerequisites). If you are new to biodiesel you can certainly
use the beginner class the prior weekend as a prerequisite.
The advanced class is longer than the regular class- 9-5 instead of 10-4.

The advanced class includes:
quality control in much more detail than ‘regular’ beginners’ class
analysis of real-world problems with offspec biodiesel
acid-base biodiesel process, for making biodiesel out of high-FFA oil
advanced topics in dewatering
testing for soap and what it is useful for
methanol recovery and equipment design
testing recovered methanol for purity
waterless washing with Amberlite and Magnesol
slightly larger-scale equipment design (for co-ops or small farms, etc)
Treating wash water and glycerine for disposal
testing wash water and glycerine, real-world test results related to
biodegradability
in-depth disposal/sidestreams discussion
burning glycerine safely for energy
hydronic applications for biodiesel and wash water heating
More advanced discussion of safety and disaster preparation and
prevention scenarios for larger-scale processor systems, discussion of
regulatory topics for non-commercial producers larger than homebrew.
Solar applications for reducing energy inputs in production
very through discussion/demonstration of several different options in
washing, including drawbacks and advantages of them

********************

No prerequisites for Beginners class Feb 17-18- no experience necessary,
come on down

********************
Prerequisites for advanced class:
Advanced Class Feb 24-25: Prior experience required. I’m taking the
unusual step of asking that you guys put a LOT of time into prep for
this class if you are not already a homebrewer, and ask that you not
come if you can not take the time to prepare. I want to make sure it’s a
high-quality discussion for advanced students (some of whom are flying
in from out of town), and am restricting attendance by experience, for
this reason.

this class is restricted to:
either:
1)-folks who are already homebrewing (see caveat at end of post about
sources of information)

2)-folks with a LOT of experience with research AND making multiple
1-liter test batches (and it’s OK if you get that experience between now
and the class time, I would like you to have about 5-6 sessions of
making a liter batch, washing it, and testing it under your belt-and to
bring these batches in, so we can “grade your homework"- to get started
now see www.biodieselcommunity.org)
3)-folks who don’t homebrew but have taken a previous hands-on class
with one of the following instructors, or a class from somebody else who
teaches from the biodieselcommunity.org ‘curriculum’ and keeps up with
recent developments in homebrewing in the past year:
myself, Jennifer Radtke, Kalib Kersch, “BioLyle” Rudensey, John Bush,
Piedmont Biofuels folks, Matt Steiman
note: If you have only attended a class but not homebrewed, and it’s
been a while, I would like you to brush up by making a test batch or two
and trying to wash it to completion so you can bring it to class Feb 24th.

4) students attending the Biofuel Oasis advanced course the previous
week (those people only, may also attend just Day 1 of the beginners
class, since they can’t come to both days because of our schedules
conflicting)

Note: Please note that if you primarily work from information from
journeytoforever.org or From the Fryer To The Fuel Tank or from a manual
from Fuelmeister or a similar plastic processor or plans you bought on
eBay, AND if you do not regularly read the quality testing/quality
control side of the Infopop/Yahoo Biodiesel/Yahoo
Biodieselbasics/Biodieselnow homebrewing forums, you may have a lot of
inaccurate information to unlearn.
I very much invite you to attend but I’d like you to do some extra
reading first to catch you up on what’s wrong with those sources.
B100supply.com (quality pages and ‘best of the forums’ section), and
biodieselcommunity.org are good places to start, and
biodiesel.infopop.cc has exceedingly good information these days in the
various forums.

To sign up, please see www.girlmark.com/tour

I had a dream this morning about the DIY SKillshare Conference, an event I helped organize for three years.

I’d moved to California in 2000, having already started the Skillshare fires going- I had found an organizing committee on a prior visit of mine a few months before I actually moved here, and set a date for the event- and it was an awesome way to move to a new town with a bang. The event was a four-day extravaganza of do-it-yourself workshops on practical skills topics, and brought several hundred people to town for classes as varied as biodiesel, greywater, medical topics, methane digesters, making DIY Sex Toys, food-related topics, as well as a few mini-workshops on stuff like Bust Your Nuts (breaking fasterners loose), knot tying, and Using A Circ Saw Safely. I LOVE being overbusy and this was a fantastic challenge. At the last Skillshare I ran a four-day/four-hours/day biodiesel course, with several shorter classes that I taught in the afternoons. I think the effects of the whole conference percolated throughout the West Coast anarchist scene for a few years.

Damn, I want to do this again.

I had a nice discussion on Friday with Dann, one of The Crucible folks about this- he was around for the last Skillshare, which we did at the Crucible shortly before they moved out of Berkeley to Oakland. Dann wrote a fantasy Tribe.net post a few years ago suggesting a transformation of Burning Man into Learning Man, a Skillshare-type event. Im not sure if Skillshare is relevant anymore in light of Makers’ Faire and also anarchist Skillshare knockoffs, but dammit, I want to do a gathering like that again.

As of this weekend it’s been a year since I"ve been doing the touring biodiesel class roadshow. In the beginning of December I slowed it down, and am still trying to mostly stay at home, as a year of constant flying all around the country every 10 days wreaked havoc on my social life. Of course just as I write this I’m planning more classes for this spring. Ugh.

Mark

upcoming dates in Satanica’s Diabolical Cooking Show includes:

Berkeley Biodiesel Beginners class: Feb 17-18
Berkeley Advanced class: Feb 24-25
Seattle, WA, March 17-18
Phoenix, AZ Apr 14-15
For more info:
www.girlmark.com/tour

Holy cats, I just got my blood test results for immune system issues. I’ve got a CD-57 killer cell count of 23. This is a diagnostic test that looks at something in the immune system that’s depressed by Lyme and not much else.

‘Normal’ is 200. I wonder how bad it was before all the antibiotics.

Eek.

I’m actually posting about this because it’s incredibly useful as a diagnostic for Lyme, and few doctors know about it, and I occasionally hear from blog readers that they’ve got family members in the same boat as I was in. CD-57 is one of the ways to measure the progress of antibiotic treatment for Lyme and minimise the risk of relapse due to quitting antibiotics too soon.

see here:

http://www.lymenet.org/drbguide200509.pdf

It’s been less than three weeks since I started to take the Buhner herbal protocol to deal with my Lyme relapse.

Today, I actually felt 100% normal again. I don’t expect that this means that I am ‘completely better’ - based on how other patients respond to this treatment protocol, I’m predicting a few relapses of shorter duration, and I’m guessing it’ll be a year of this- but it’s absolutely amazing to me that this terrible disease can be managed without the antibiotics.

The Buhner herbal protocol works well in conjunction with antibiotics, but at the moment I’m just trying to aim for symptom management without bringing out the chemical pharmaceuticals- it’d certainly be easier on the side effects.

There’s actually a pretty substantial amount of evidence that certain powerful herbs such as the ones I’m taking work better than antibiotics, or better than other pharmaceutical drugs, for some pretty serious illnesses, including some drug-resistant bacteria, many viruses, and some parasites.

For example, one of the herbs I’ve been taking has been shown to improve outcomes in HIV treatment- it makes AZT work better than either AZT or the herb alone- and another one of the herbs I’m taking works wonders on chloroquine-resistant malaria.

Another simple herb that I’m taking for Lyme and potentially for bartonella- a tea that I sometimes take for ordinary flu- was successfully used to save lives during the 1918 flu pandemic by MD’s who used botanical medicine- at a time when ‘The Regulars’, the medical tradition which comprised the AMA at the turn of the century- were busy treating the pandemic flu by making people drink mercury ("calomel"). America got rid of the botanical MD’s through a variety of means when the mercury-prescribers started the AMA and left the botanical doctors out of it for political reasons (thank God they eventually stopped using mercury as a drug)

Pandemic flu, in case you’ve been under a rock this past year, is a virulent outbreak of extremely serious flu, similar to what we’re going to get once bird flu hits on a large scale and Tamilflu fails. It’s the stuff that kills perfectly healthy people in their 20’s, not just the elderly and the immune compromised. It sweeps through human populations every few decades, such as the bird flu version floating around Asia at the moment threatening to erupt into the virulent form and hit the US. Tamilflu is notoriously ineffective and it seems to be the ONLY tool in the box at the moment in the US. We’re screwed when this thing flares up again. The next time around.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about historical uses of herbal medicine by the 19th century American physicians known as the Eclectics (that’s where the pandemic flu info came from). I’ve been researching pandemic flu as part of general disaster preparedness group I"m in, and absolutely nothing I’m finding says that we’re prepared for the next big one- and we’ve lost much of the diagnostic knowledge to tackle it as the Eclectics did (their complex diagnostic methods resembled the pulse readings of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and they prescribed different medicine for different patients based on types of symptoms rather than just which infectious organism they were afflicted by).

There are some aspects of health care that the mainstream medical establishment is great at- sewing people back together- but in this country we’re only using half the tools in the box by focusing only on pharmaceutical, single-constituent drugs, ignoring nutrition and stress and immune support, and wasting some of our most powerful drugs, particularly antibiotics. We’ve abused them to the point of uselessness, such as the cases of drug-resistant bacteria caused by overuse of antibiotics and the use of antibiotics in factory farming of livestock. It’s not that I want to leave medical treatment to the current population of herbalists only- but I feel a sense of loss that we’re working with one hand tied behind our backs by focusing on single-constituent pharmaceuticals only, when research and evidence shows that infectious diseases are better tackled with a multipronged approach such as that found in the complex compounds of medicinal herbs.

The more I learn about health , the more concerned I am about the coming “fire next time” in the face of emerging infectious diseases.

I suspect we’re going to be going back to botanical medicine on some scale before too long. There’s fairly good evidence that bacteria don’t develop antibiotic resistance to the incredibly complex mix of compounds in these herbs, and a lot of evidence that they include tools for dealing with viruses that we don’t have perfect drugs for yet either. Having seen how well antibiotics work on this disabling illness, I’m furious that we’re wasting them so frivolously.

This made my week:
http://www.giantmicrobes.com/
(there’s a Lyme spirochete in there, although I think my favorites are the Calamities: Ebola, Flesh Eating Bacteria, Black Death, Typhoid, and Mad Cow)

Someone pointed out that her friends bought her the spirochete for Christmas, and she had to restrain herself from buying a bunch of lymphocytes to go after the spirochete.

I haven’t done anything with biodiesel in the past couple of weeks because I’ve been fighting like crazy to get Lyme Disease under control.

I got off my antibiotics around Thanksgiving, spent a month feeling 100% cured, then got slammed rather rapidly a month later. It started with body pains and quickly degenerated to sleeping 13 hours a day and not having energy to go anywhere, exercise, cook, fix things that are broken, or work at the computer. I also picked up new symptoms I didn’t have before, which disturbingly are symptoms of Bartonella, a common tick-borne disease that’s a co-infection in many Lyme patients. I hadn’t tested for coinfections before because I didn’t have symptoms and the tests are notoriously ineffective.

This time around, I decided to experiment. I had about a month before I need to function again, and really didn’t have to do anything until the Houston class, as a matter of fact.

I had just spent a month trying to get over the side effects of antibiotics (ie digestive stuff), so when I got sick again I ignored the antibiotics that I have sitting in the medicine cabinet, and instead went whole hog on the herbal treatment from Stephen Buhner’s book Healing Lyme.

I quickly got a huge energy rush, which I think came from the Eleuthero Ginseng (ie siberian ginseng)- I felt high for several days, kinda uncomfortably- though my pain and other symptoms kept swinging back and forth.

I added a new herb, that (among other things helpful for Lyme) is a treatment for Bartonella- and immediately felt even worse for two days, like I’d been run over by a truck. There’s a theory among Lyme doctors that Lyme Disease can cause the Jarsch-Herxheimer Reaction- a worsening of symptoms when large die-offs of bacteria occur- so this added to my co-infection fears. “Herxes” are a difficult thing to diagnose and evaluate because several different things can cause you to feel bad- treatment failures, a herx, or a side effect in some cases. Often experiencing a ‘herx’ gives people (or doctors) some feedback on a treatment actually working.

I added some herbs for lymph system clearing and instead got swollen lymph nodes. Obviously, a lot has been wrong all along that needs more attention and more time with the generally slow-acting herbs.

I spent a lot of time at home, reading about tick-borne diseases, reading about the immune system, and looking at the clock to see if it was time to take the pills yet.

I got my toxic metals challenge results- and have high mercury somewhere. That’s a long, 6 month+ process of chelating the mercury out- you don’t want to do it quickly or it can’t be excreted and just moves around redistributing to other parts of your body, so I spent an hour on the phone with my doctor planning out how that process is going to take place.

There was an amusing side note to the dreaded metals test- the doctor told me I also tested extremely high in bismuth, which he hadn’t heard of before- he sounded worried and said he’d have to research what makes that happen and how to get rid of it. Then I pointed out that I’d just had Pepto-Bismol that day, which is of course where the bismuth came from.

After about 10 days of religious pill-swallowing, the stronger herbs kicked in and my symptoms became managable again.

I’ve been in good shape for a week now and am rushing around catching up on all the ‘deferred maintenance’ stuff. I’ll be getting the Bartonella test next week, and will decide what to do based on the test results, the results of some immune system killer cell testing I had last week, and on whether I continue to have managable symptoms using just the herbs.

The mercury chelation stuff is going to be expensive- not just the chelators, but all the liver support supplements I’m trying to take to make sure the mercury actually heads out rather than knocking around my system somewhere.

Assuming I can still keep feeling semi-decent, I may decide to experiment with just herbal treatment for a few months- the herbs sometimes seem to work better than the antibiotics, and I already know I had multiple treatment failures with the antibiotics.

I have the luxury of not having to go to a job at the moment, so taking the winter to ‘experiment’ with health seems do-able this time whereas I couldn’t have afforded it last summer.